It's no secret that artificial intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing the SME and B2B marketing landscape. From content creation to email marketing, AI is changing the way businesses market their products and services. It's lowering barriers needed to compete asymmetrically against better funded competition. If you're not already using AI to power your marketing efforts, you're falling behind. Here are the 7 AI marketing categories I'll be discussing that may benefit your B2B:
-
Video Marketing AI
-
Content Writing AI
-
Social Media AI
-
Buyer Persona AI
-
Email Marketing AI
-
Competitor Analysis AI
-
Advertising AI
âBe sure that you're targeting early wins first so that you can quickly gain momentum, motivation and organizational buy-in.â
Sound interesting? Then letâs get started!
Video Marketing AI
If you're not using video to market your business, you're missing out. Video is now one of the most effective marketing tools available, and with video marketing AI, it's easier than ever to create high-quality videos that capture your audience's attention. Video marketing AI software like Splasheo, Wave Animatron, or Lumen5 makes it easy to create professional-looking videos without any prior video editing experience. Just select a template, add your logo and text, and let the software do the rest. Once the video marketing AI software has made the first draft, just jump into the editor to change text, stock video, or transition effects.
You can easily create blog summary videos, advertising assets, listicles, and social media content, or enhance a company video podcast or live stream in a matter of minutes or hours. There's no need to hire a costly video production companyâyou can create stunning videos in-house with ease. Save that money for retargeting your website visitors to buy that product or request a quote!
Content Writing AI
I tried Jasper on this article and was pleased with my starting point.
Businesses need to produce a lot of content to stay competitive. Webpages, blogs, case studies, social media posting, video scripts for that neat AI software you're about to try... but creating quality content can be time-consuming and expensive. That's where content writing AI comes in. Content writing AI software like Quill, Persado, RAD AI, Jasper or Anyword allows businesses to quickly and easily create quality content at scale.
These content writing AIs use Natural Language Processing algorithms to analyze your topic and then generate a completely original article or webpage copy in minutes. I tried Jasper on this article and was pleased with my starting point. So long as you know who your target audience is and the tone for your brand, the content description or content brief you provide will come to life in a matter of moments.
It's not just long-form content or blogs you can generate with these AI writers; you can produce ad copy, social media text, captions, or even video script drafts that do much of the initial heavy lifting. Now there's no need to spend hours writing articles completely by handâlet the software do the work so your team can do the human stuff.
Social Media AI
Social media is a powerful marketing outreach and awareness tool, but crafting engaging social media posts can be challengingâespecially if you're posting on multiple platforms.
Social media writing AI software like Emplifi.io and our content writing AIs mentioned earlier can help take the guesswork out of creating social media, optimal timing, and scheduling it by automatically generating posts that are optimized for each platform, while still based on your target customer audience. Social media AIs make it easy to schedule and publish your posts at the best times so you can free up your team's time for the more important tasks AIs can't do.
Before spending on social AIs, consider where the bulk of your online leads and customers have historically come from. If your analytics show that social media channels currently drive more than 13-15% of your marketing qualified leads (MQL), an investment or trialing of a social AI should be on your shortlist as a potential low-hanging fruit opportunity.
Segmentation and Buyer Persona AI
Developing buyer personas for your business is a critical marketing activity that influences not just marketing, but your sales team and the effectiveness of your customer service & retention. Unfortunately, doing research well using a combination of tools for surveys, interviewing and publicly available information is not convenient, nor is it easy for every marketing professional to do.
Executive leadership knows it's essential to understand who the best kinds of customers are and what their pain points and aspirations may be. But doing this effectively is highly nuanced. Yet it needs to be the core of every marketing strategy your business does. The good news is that I have a few AIs that can jumpstart the work if it's not done yet, or further enhance the definition and quality of established buyer personas your sales and marketing teams share.
I'll explain briefly the way AI does this for those who are curious like me. AI uses Big Data found from social media platforms, job descriptions, and publicly available user-generated content (USG) from review sites of various kinds as a starting point, along with whatever inputs you initially provided. Linkfluence, Pulsar Platform or NewtonX can gauge and digest this data to uncover details about your target audience you didn't know exist so that you can execute strong marketing persona intel.
In a similar vein but for B2B teams targeting business accounts software like 6sense.com can help your sales team identify and prioritize target accounts, get buying team specifics, optimize for timely engagements with those accounts along with keeping it relevant and adding value without being pushy, all while keeping the ball rolling until prospects are sale-ready.
Email Marketing AI
When leads unsubscribe, you lose that digital doorway that leads directly to their attention.
Email remains one of the most effective marketing channels available, but manually crafting individual emails can be time-consuming and tedious. And if you donât know your audience well enough? When leads unsubscribe, you lose that digital doorway that leads directly to their attention. And with the volume of email spam, weâre all getting today, the stakes have never been higher with crafting the right emails at the right time.
Email marketing AI software like AdRoll or Hubspot makes it easy to create personalized emails at scale. These SaaS machine learning algorithms analyze customer data and then generate custom emails that are designed to convert. Plus, real-time reporting capabilities allow you to track the performance of your email campaigns so you can optimize results over a period of time.
Regardless of the specific email software, almost all email marketing SaaSâ these days have varying levels of machine learning or AI built-in because it has quickly become the standard. But don't forget our content writing AIs mentioned earlier because they too can draft emails!
Either way, now you know you can take the guesswork out of effective email marketing campaigns and focus more on what matters mostâgrowing your business.
Competitor Analysis AI
budgeting for a CI program comes down to how similar your product or service is to your competition, and how profitable the margins are with the product.
Similarly to the way sales persona AI works, competitor analysis AI takes the big data found from job sites, reviews, and social media posts and then synthesizes the unstructured data into an API that can meaningfully structure the information into competitor intelligence (CI). I'm a fan of Crayon because of their blog but there are other highly regarded options at varying price points like Deeperinsights.com and Klue.com, to name a few.
My recommendation for budgeting for a CI program comes down to how similar your product or service is to your competition, and how profitable the margins are with the product.
For instance, if you sell a product or service that's nearly identical to your competitor and the margins make it quite profitable, explore the CI options to defend against loss of market share or simply grow your share of the addressable market. And if you believe youâre on the other end of the spectrum, differentiation strategies via regular content creation and awareness campaigns should be prioritized, instead.
Digital Advertising AI
We already considered Google Ads and other major advertising platforms AI applications today. Creating a lookalike audience based on customer lists or similar interests meets the criteria and standards. Even being able to anonymously retarget your audience after they visit your website is AI. What isn't standard is creating display ads, video ads, and search ads that get results.
When applying a growth marketing perspective, we can just apply our AI content and copywriter to write scripts that can be copied and pasted into an AI video maker or formatted into design software like Canva's templates. But Rad AI, Persado, Jasper or Anyword will be up for the job for most ad copy needs. Just feed it into Lumen5 or another video SaaS, and do those final tweaks, and your set!
Closing Advice
âBe sure that you're targeting early wins first so that you can quickly gain momentum, motivation and organizational buy-in.â
Everyone's going to have a unique starting point for integrating marketing AI into their business or job. So start with what's most time-consuming, expensive, or what is a glaringly obvious deficiency for your business right now.
Some may want to trim back their reliance on advertising agencies, and for others, video marketing could be almost nonexistent or take up a massive amount of marketing budget by outsourcing. Whatever it is, be sure that you're targeting early wins first so that you can quickly gain the momentum, motivation, and organizational buy-in needed to make your marketing AI transformation a success.